Aryabhata
Born 476 Died c. 550
Indian mathematician and astronomer
Al-Khwarizmi
Born c. 780 Died c. 850
Arab mathematician, astronomer, and geographer
Al-Razi
Born c. 864 Died c. 925
Arab physician and philosopher
Alhazen
Born 965 Died 1039
Arab mathematician and physicist
Roger Bacon
Born 1213 Died 1292
English philosopher and scientist
In modern times, people are accustomed to thinking of the West—Western Europe and lands such as the United States that have been heavily influenced by Western Europe—as being at the forefront of mathematical and scientific knowledge. This was not always the case, however: during the Middle Ages, the focal point of learning in math and science lay far to the east, in India and the Arab world.
The five biographies that follow illustrate the process whereby knowledge seeped westward, from the Hindu mathematician Aryabhata in the 500s to the English scientist Roger Bacon seven centuries later. In between were many, many scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers in the region that produced perhaps the greatest intellectual achievements during the medieval period: the Middle East. Al-Khwarizmi, al-Razi, and Alhazen—along with Avicenna (see box in Moses Maimonides entry), Averroes (see entry), al-Mas'udi (see Historians entry), Omar Khayyam (see box in Dante Alighieri entry), al-Idrisi, and Yaqut— were far from the only notable Arab and Persian thinkers: just some of the greatest.
"Praise God the creator who has bestowed upon man the power to discover the significance of numbers. Indeed, reflecting that all things which men need require computation, I discovered that all things involve number.... Moreover I discovered all numbers to be so arranged that they proceed from unity up to ten."
Al-Khwarizmi, Kitab al-jabr wa al-muquabalah
Two Great Byzantines
Much of the driving force behind advances in science during the Middle Ages came from the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts by Arab scientists. During the early part of the medieval era, the writings of Aristotle and others were lost to Western Europe, where learning in general came to a virtual standstill. By contrast, knowledge of the Greek writers remained alive in the Greek-controlled lands of the Byzantine Empire.
One of the greatest Byzantine commentators on science was not even a scientist but a philosopher and theologian who also wrote about grammar—as his name, John the Grammarian or Johannes Philo-ponus (yoh-HAHN-uhs ful-AHP-uh-nus; c. 490-570), suggests. Johannes challenged
The assertion by Aristotle that a physical body will only move as long as something is pushing it. On the contrary, Johannes maintained, a body will keep moving in the absence of friction or opposition. Five centuries later, Avicenna would uphold Johannes's idea; and many centuries after that, the concept would be embodied in one of the laws of motion established by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
Also important was the surgeon Paul of Aegina (i-JY-nuh; c. 625-c. 690). He was the first to practice obstetrics, the branch of medical science dealing with birth, as a specialty. His writings summed up virtually all that was known about medicine up to his time, and greatly influenced the work of later Arab scientists.
World History
